Turkeys

Hubby came home from work a few months ago and asked if we wanted turkeys.

After hearing from him several times over the last few years that we were never getting turkeys, I was quite surprised to hear this from him.

One of his workmates has a friend who has 60 turkeys free-ranging and they were becoming a problem and needed to go.  Because she'd started with two originally, they were all her babies and she didn't want to eat them or know about it if anyone was going to eat them.  She wanted to be able to tell herself they were going off to be pets for someone who would love them like she did.  She'd tried selling them on TradeMe, but because of the recent push for certified humane animal breeders and sellers, her ads kept getting removed.

We talked about it for a few weeks and I rang her.  We converted a pen in a paddock to a turkey house thinking that if we clipped wings, the deer fencing would be sufficient to contain them.  Then we finally went to pick them up with a covered box trailer.  The theory was that if we threw some food in, they'd go in after the food.  I think it took about half an hour for any of them to brave the trailer - after the roosters had been in and out a few times.  After a while, we figured we had all in there that we were going to get and shut up the trailer.  We got six turkeys, four boys and two girls.  And two roosters who escaped as soon as we got home.

Six turkeys investigating their new house.

In my head, I knew turkeys were big.  I hadn't physically seen a turkey since I was a small child though and then they seemed like ostrich size.  I was still surprised by just how big they were.  Then seeing how high they could jump (even without flying) meant that the deer fencing would not be sufficient to keep them contained.  The paddock next door to their paddock had been planted in green feed, mostly oats and kale.  I'm fairly confident our neighbour would shoot and eat any that he found in his greenfeed and I couldn't blame him honestly.

We'd planned to shut them in their newly built house for a couple of days anyway, like I do with any new chickens I get, so they get to know where home is.  The need to create a covered run meant they got to stay confined for a week while the run was created out of deer fence waratahs (or Y posts as they're more correctly named) and 2m wide chicken wire.  Dad and Hubby sat down and did the maths to figure out what would be the best size, utilising existing fencing to get the most area out of 100m of chicken wire (including roof).  Then they discovered that the roll of chicken wire was only 50m and they'd run out with the run only half roofed.

Exploring the covered run.

Finishing the run took a little longer than expected, or rather it took longer than planned because delays, dramas and holdups are pretty much expected these days.  But the turkeys seemed to like their new run and spent a lot of time exploring it.

I worried a little on and off as their wattles seemed to be going white.  In chickens, white comb and wattles are a sign of ill health and I assumed that turkeys were the same.  I spent some time on google but couldn't really find anything definitive - one website suggested that wattle colour in turkeys was more a sign of their mood.

Pale wattles 

Last weekend, ten more joined them.  The lady I mentioned earlier has been feeding the turkeys in a caged trailer for the last month or so and they're used to going into the cage on the trailer for food.  It made shutting in more turkeys a piece of cake.  She and her hubby thought they'd even enjoyed the hour drive to our place.  They'd been quiet but still alert and watching everything around them.

This is the four boys just as the new turkeys were joining them.

As they were backing the trailer up to the turkey run, the six we already had found it quite threatening.  The girls rushed off and hid in the house, while the boys puffed themselves up, tails fanned, wattles bright red and snoods hanging halfway down to their chests.  The new turkeys coming to join them had come from the same place they had, they'd only had approximately a month apart, but obviously the pecking order had to be re-established.  There were lots of fanned tails, red faces and thrumming noises over the next hour or so.  

Pecking order being sorted

They seem to have it mostly sorted out now, but our head count shows ten boys to six girls, so those numbers will need some serious adjusting very soon.  A friend has mentioned she has another friend who has turkeys, so I may try and arrange a swap for some boys just to get some fresh bloodlines in - I think all of mine are related.  I'm fairly sure the lady we got them from said she started with one pair and from them came the other 58.

She also told us that the facial colours are a sign of mood.  Red wattles and blue-purple round the eyes is when they're agitated, upset or fighting for dominance.  Pink and white is a fairly relaxed and normal state.

We did managed to drive the escaped roosters towards the chook run.  Once they realised that there were 40 or 50 odd hens on the other side of the fence, they were no longer worried about me chasing them, they suddenly started posing and nonchalantly showing off for the girls.  One wouldn't go into the chook run for another two weeks.  He nearly became dinner as he'd start crowing outside our bedroom from about 4am, but we did eventually get him in there.

Five Year Anniversary

Last month marked five years on our little block.

I still remember moving in.  It was hectic, filling up a rented small truck several times over, loading up cars and trailers and driving more than an hour in convoy to our little block.

For those who don't know the story, we were living in Wainoni in the Eastern suburbs of Christchurch.  Those Eastern suburbs suffered badly in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Mostly because the land we were on was only soil on the top maybe 40cm and sand underneath that.  The house we'd just spent 7 years gradually renovating needed to be started again from scratch.

In some spots, the foundations had sunk enough that you could pull bricks out of the outside walls without any sort of resistance.  The lino had bunched up in this corner but had a gap in that one.  There were cracks of up to 10mm in some of the internal walls.  Walking across the kitchen floor made you feel seasick but according to EQC we were still officially liveable and I had several arguments about what was existing wear and tear and what was new.  We could probably have coped with that, if it wasn't for the constant wearing on your nerves that goes with this kind of event and the tens of thousands of aftershocks.

We'd have a noticeable aftershock at least 5 times a week.  Cars driving slowly past my house felt like aftershocks and made the house shake and tremble.  Everyone was on edge all the time.  Nerves were frayed and we were all brittle and uptight and irritable.

Hubby came home one day and told me he'd arranged for a mortgage broker to come and see us and find out how much we could borrow.  He didn't want to come home to our place anymore, his daily commute had doubled because of all the road damage and he found himself dreading coming home from work every day.  We found that if we rented out our house, the amount we could easily borrow was much higher than expected and I shortly realised that it was possible for us to finally live our dream of having a lifestyle block.

We looked at a lot of places, some okay and some dreadful.  None quite ticked all our boxes.  Then with the help of friends who were real estate agents, we came to have a look at what became our block and immediately fell in love.  Several times since, those friends have said that they've never seen buyers and a property more suited to each other.

It was a very quick process because the tenants we'd organised needed to be out of their previous place by a particular date.  In five weeks, we had finance sorted, insurance sorted (although that had it's dramas), schools mostly sorted for the kids and an extra moving with us - Miss (then) 15's boyfriend found himself homeless and they had this dependency thing going on. It was easier to have him move with us (with some strict rules of course) and then I knew Miss 15 would come home each day, which had also been a problem.

We moved into an old farm cottage that had been extended a few times and needed some love.  Our block took some months to get our heads around the size of our land.  It felt like I was walking in a public park.

Hubby needs a project, he's a busy relaxer.  The gorse that covered half of our block provided him with that.  I make jokes now and then that he and the gorse are like Jean Valjean and Javert - there are times when there have been more important jobs that need doing, but he'd be cutting and burning gorse.  When we got our first chickens, I picked them up before he'd finished the house so that he had to get it done quickly.

Achievements:

We've fenced the half of the property that hadn't previously been fenced.  Where there was a huge open area, there are now four distinct paddocks.  We've strung them with electric fencing, there is undergate wire to continue the circuits, we've put gates in.  There are still two more fences to put in.

We've planted a small orchard and managed to keep it alive.  Keeping it alive might not sound like a big deal, but given the hot, dry gale force Nor'West winds we get every spring and two years of crippling drought, I find it rather impressive.  We even got fruit this year from some of them.

We have taken out more than half of our grocery bill in foods we provide for ourselves.  I haven't bought meat, dairy or eggs in a year and a half.  I only buy potatoes for a few months of the year (depending on how my crop went) and I have plenty broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  There's usually tomato pastes and pasta sauces frozen to last at least six months too.

The renovations we've done have made the house warmer in winter, more vermin proof, far more pleasant to live in.  The leaks in the roof have been fixed, the rotten floors in two rooms have been ripped out and replaced and we're slowly insulating the external walls.

I handraised a cow that I am now milking.  I am currently taming two heifers (that are the daughters of my older cows) so that I can milk them when they calve.  I can touch them briefly without them bolting now, they just shake their heads and step away and you can almost hear them telling me to go away.

Paddocks that were probably three quarters gorse are now cleared.  There is still and will most likely always be the odd small plant that pops up, but they're easily managed in under an hour.  Compared to the weeks that each paddock took to cut, burn and spray.

Lessons:

Sometimes a visual barrier works as well as a brick wall to keep livestock contained, but sometimes it doesn't - it's important to know when it will and when it won't.

Hay is a commodity that is worth more than gold, treat your hay with respect.

If you have livestock, you have dead stock.

There is a right and wrong way to set up an electric fence.

It pays to learn how to do your own plumbing and drainage repairs because getting a plumber to even return your calls in less than a year is a major achievement.

There's no such thing as "Unusable land".

Never say never.  Animals that you (or rather Hubby) declared you'd never get can easily become a well-loved feature of your farm.
In the last five years, we've had our ups and downs, we've had successes and failures, joys and heartbreaks but there's still nowhere I'd rather be.